Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Life in A Day (2011)

This is the first crowd-sourced film that I have watched. The film posed most possibly the simplest and yet most profound and intriguing question to the people around the planet: What was life like on planet Earth on July 24, 2010? And asked people to submit their personal accounts of the day in a moving image form, that is cinema. Developed from 4,500 hours of user-submitted YouTube videos from 192 countries, the film documents personally significant moments. What we get as the end product is a competently constructed mosaic of contrasting views on life. The film advances chronologically and thematically. On both sides there exists an amazing level of homogeneity. The mundane activities that occupy our lives on a daily basis are all too familiar to each of us. The sublunary activities are the same, the processes are different. The ultimate human desires are nearly identical but the recipes to achieve them are vastly dissimilar. In showcasing proceedings of daily life, the film exhibits the whole gamut of human emotions and touches upon topics as diverse as life and death, fear and fearlessness, love and heart-break, intimacy and aloneness, solitude and togetherness, cruelty and compassion, poverty and abundance, achievements and failures, freedom and captivity, simplicity and complexity, material and spiritual, and many more. What emerges from all these is the grand truth about life, and that is, human life is a perfect embodiment of monotony. Despite our best efforts to make extraordinary images out of an ordinary life, we slowly give in to the traditional demands of life and on an eerie night suddenly discover the futility of life just like the last human did in Life in a Day.And despite all its monotony, it still remains a Rubik's Cube.